Wednesday roundup, “Scary Politicians” edition

Happy Halloween. Wonder what Jane Hague will be going as this year? And where? And how?

In today’s Scary Politician news, an anti-gay Southwest Washington Republican (natch) state rep goes to Spokane to watch gay porn and hit on gay strangers. After all, Spokane’s thriving local gay scene did such wonders for Jim West’s career. State Rep. Richard Curtis’s semi-local newspaper, The Columbian, lays out the sordid details.

Big props to neighborhood activists (including HA’s own Paul Andrews) whose years of hard work paid off Tuesday when a hearing examiner did what neither Greg Nickels’ crony-fied Parks Department nor the City Council would do: put an end to the ill-conceived zoo parking garage scheme. Let’s be clear: the zoo’s garage was never about allowing more of the masses (and their kids) to see cute furry animals. It was all about hosting revenue-producing special events for companies, trade groups, and other people with the money to burn on them — just like the recent Seattle Aquarium Expansion, the GasWorks Park Summer Concerts series, the city’s count-‘em three taxpayer-built convention centers (the big one over I-5 and the two new competitors, one the Port of Seattle’s Pier 66, the other adjacent to Qwest Field), and so on. In the case of the zoo, it would have dumped that much more traffic into an area of two-lane arterials already seeing a glut of new high end condo-complex construction along Phinney Ridge. A bad idea, illegally implemented, finally shot down not by local constituents’ elected officials, but by the legal process.

Speaking of less car traffic, it was announced yesterday that nationally and locally, FlexCar and Zipcar will be merging. FlexCar is based here in Seattle; the larger Zipcar is based in Boston. The new company will be Zipcar, based in Cambridge.

OK, this isn’t a Jane Hague joke. Honest. KING-TV reports that the county councilwoman is now being sued for defamation by opponent Richard Pope’s campaign manager over what he claims are false allegations by the Hague campaign that he’s been convicted for domestic violence. Oh, and our friend Richard (will someone hire this guy to do permanent opposition research?) has also discovered, according to the same KING story, that when Hague’s mother died last year she left Jane out of the will. (Fill in obligatory David Irons punchline here.)

Here’s an excellent example of how supposedly objective journalism isn’t, from a lede this morning on that old warhorse, local housing prices, in the P-I:

Home-price appreciation in the Seattle area led the nation for the 12th month in a row in August, but indications were not entirely positive, according to a national index report released Tuesday.

Catch that? Inherent in the lede is the assumption that having the highest home appreciation rates in the country for a year running is “positive” (though other indicators, maybe not so much). If you already own a house and aren’t on a fixed income (a category that includes, presumably, P-I reporter Aubrey Cohen), that’s true: it means your biggest asset is performing nicely as an investment. But if you’re one of the 50% of our city who rents, chasing the ever-receding hope of affordable first-time home ownership, or if you’re on a fixed income and getting squeezed by the higher property taxes that inevitably come with a housing boom, not so much. And if you’re in one of those latter categories, what the P-I has just “objectively” told you is either, at best, that you don’t count, or, even worse, that you don’t exist.

do I smell a Pulitzer? — Proposition One doesn’t fully fund a new SR 520 bridge)
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This isn’t so clear to a lot of voters I suspect, whatever one thinks of Prop 1. This bridge will require a bunch more $$ from taxpayers in one form or another beyond Roads and Transit. And that’s where the suspense begins – even if Prop 1 is successful a big chunk of money will have to be found to close a big gap that is only a big estimate at this point.

No… the Seattle PI has just told renters that the local economy may be in danger of recession. If housing values stop rising, that reduces the number of home equity loans, which reduces money spent in the city. That slows the city’s economy.

It isn’t just about the individual investment, it’s also about the effect that investment has on the owner’s liquidity and the ensuing effect on the market.

But if you’re one of the 50% of our city who rents, chasing the ever-receding hope of affordable first-time home ownership, or if you’re on a fixed income and getting squeezed by the higher property taxes that inevitably come with a housing boom, not so much.
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Geov, then you’re certainly also aware a large swath of Seattle’s residents are getting squeezed as the cost of services and the tax burden increases year after year to fund a variety of new projects and other needs. And there’s more to come, of course, with a variety of big transportation projects and other requests pending. Those frothy homes prices in Seattle and the surrounding region are just part of a larger story as more people move into the region for jobs or the beautiful location. Incidentally, home prices may drop somewhat in this region, but they’re eventually continue up again I believe.

@1 Fixed. WordPress, to my undying frustration, has a preview function for comments, but not for posting, to catch dumb HTML errors.

@3 Heath: OK, educate me. How does a rising housing value (or more specifically, one that rises the extra few tenths of a percent necessary to lead the nation) increase the number of home equity loans? You don’t get any decent home equity until you’ve owned your home a number of years; at that point, how many tenths of a percent the value on average has gone up in a month has a miniscule effect on your overall equity, and hence liquidity. Is it a psychological effect on people’s willingness to seek out such loans? What’s the correlating rise and drop on such loans, and in turn that effect on the local economy? I would think it’d be miniscule. And how does that “ensuing effect on the market” benefit a renter that can’t afford to enter the housing market due to rising prices? It sounds to my non-economist ears like a knee-jerk ideological response, and that you could also make the exact same argument for the benefits of the housing bubble — or hyperinflation. But I’m not an economist, and I’m willing to be wrong. So show me some numbers. Educate me.

And while you’re at it, explain why the P-I, or anyone else in local media, has never bothered to lay out this case. The all-housing-price-rises-are-good meme is a staple of local media even though it’s made home ownership, or even affordable renting, impossible for a lot of people.

It reminds me of the weather forecasters when I lived in Houston, who’d chirp that “it’s gonna be another beautiful day” when it was 97 with 97% humidity, brutally uncomfortable, and people were dying of heat stroke and the like. But they were mostly poor and elderly, so it was a beautiful day for the clueless folks who only saw it outside their air-conditioned windows.

@3 again. One more stupid non-economist question. The amount of equity you have in your home is a measure of the terms of your mortgage and how much of it you’ve paid – not your home’s current market value. So what’s it got to do with the housing market (and your eligibility for an equity loan of greater value) at all?

The amount of equity you have in your home is a measure of the terms of your mortgage and how much of it you’ve paid – not your home’s current market value.
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From a lender’s perspective, home’s appraised value less balance of your home loans – what the lender would use for assessing your credit worthiness. If you’re selling your home or perhaps trying to determine your net worth, market value less balance of your home loans.

@6 I (like Goldy) actually kind of like Venus. But putting the issue of her likeability, electability & suitability aside for the moment…why in the hell did she/her advisors think it would be a good idea to discuss her DUI arrest with Robert Mak?! Bobby M may not be Edward R. Murrow but asking a politician who is pleading not guilty to a DUI about it on TV is a journalist’s wet dream…shooting fish in a barrel and she came out the worse for wear.

I think the Dems should put Jane Hague up as a Republican poster girl. Give her full recognition and publicity (radio and TV slots) for her endless parade of errors. I can’t believe an informed voter could, with a straight face, vote for her. Apparently (if the post is correct) her own mother wouldn’t vote for her. From her lack of knowledge about the requirement to license her dog, to driving drunk,trashing the police, losing her campaign funds and numerous PDC violations she is really eye catching and says a lot about Republicans.

Pope is still a kook. No matter how much shit he digs up on others, which I must say is a bit out of line when it comes to a mother who has passed on. Anyone notice how Dickie P never runs on a platform for WHAT THE HELL HE WOULD DO ON THE COUNCIL? What a loser.

The real estate market hasn’t yet gone “over the top” like it has in other parts of the country. Until then, you’re going to see the local papers saying what the brokers who pay for all those ads in the Sunday paper want them to. Right now, they’re trying to keep what momentum there is going, but if you want a taste of what we’re going to be reading in six months or so, take a peek of the Los Angeles Times. Now they’re writing articles about all the foreclosure bargains there are to be had.

So that’s where the idea of mass deportations of bunnies came from! I wondered about that. The parks department’s club-footed efforts to depopulate Green Lake Park of rabbits smacks of Armenian-style “relocation.”

Isn’t Obama’s McClurkin jerkin’ just too precious for words? All that strategic pandering to the bigots of the Religious Left, and BO’s only apparent reward is the throwing of tantrums by Doorknob Dan Savage (who is so upSET!) and by what’s his name who edits the GBLT whatever it is.

Watch this space or the Slog, boys and girls, for it’s only a matter of time until The Stranger pulls on its patent leather boy-pumps and goes to WAR! First it was smegma. Then it was Santorum. Now it’s Obama who’s got to be put down.

Don’t you just love it when Democrats get down and go down on their own?

Geov, I need to clear up something in relation to housing prices and property taxes. The latter are based on the home’s RELATIVE VALUE to other properties in the tax base. Here’s how it works:

Property tax formulas and lids limit the total revenue that can be collected from homeowners. (So-called “excess levies” can increase this amount, of course.)

The taxing jurisdiction determines how much revenue to collect, up to the lidded amount. (It theoretically can be less than what the law allows.) (Ha!)

The taxes that may thus be collected are divvied up among the property owners in proportion to assessed valuation.

Bottom line: Property values tend to rise unevenly, with homes in desirable areas rising faster, and less desirable properties rising slower. Those that appreciate more than the area-wide average will see property tax increases because a proportionately larger share of the overall tax burden is allocated to them. As a rule, because of annual adjustments to lid limits and excess levies, all property owners will experience rising property taxes, but owners of properties appreciating less than the area-wide average appreciation — even though they may be appreciating rapidly — generally will see minor tax increase at worst and may even get tax cuts.

To illustrate, let’s take two hypothetical houses. Let’s begin with an assessed value of $200,000 for each. Let’s also say these two houses are the entire tax base, the total tax collected is $5,000 a year, and this amount is lidded at 1% annual growth. We’ll skip excess levies for simplicity’s sake.

We start with both owners paying $2,500 a year of property taxes. Over a 5-year period, the total tax collected grows to $5255.05. House A doubles in value, while House B increases 70% in value. This is bad news for would-be buyers of both houses, but let’s see what it does to the property taxes.

In Year 0, both owners paid $2,500. At Year 5, they’re collectively paying $255.05 more, but the total tax burden is now distributed as follows:

As you can see, the owner of House B is paying less tax even though his property value has increased by 70% because his property now comprises a relatively smaller share of the total tax base. Thus, it is HOW YOUR PROPERTY APPRECIATES RELATIVE TO OTHER PROPERTIES that determines what effect housing inflation has on your property taxes.

And for you complaining about home prices, for the record, the house I’ve owned nearly 20 years has appreciated about equal to the inflation rate, and less than what its purchase price would have earned if I had put that money in a savings account. Seattle housing has ALWAYS been expensive; its appreciation over time is modest, and looks steep only because Seattle housing prices tend to follow a staircase pattern: They’ll stay absolutely flat for a decade, then go upward very rapidly for a couple years, then flatten out again. Yes, prices rose rapidly over the last 5 years, but they hadn’t risen at all in the preceding 15 years, and there was an awful lot of catch-up embedded in those price increases. At least, this is true of my neighborhood.

So, if you are younger than me, and trying to buy your first home in this market, you’re going through exactly what all of us went through when we bought our homes: It’s tough to scrape up the monthly payment; it’s expensive as hell in relation to your income and resources; it requires sacrifices and financial hand-wringing to do it; and, if you have any brains, you’ll opt for a fixed-rate mortgage so things get easier for you later (your income will rise, but your mortgage payments won’t, gradually leaving you with more disposable income) and you won’t borrow against your accumulating equity to make consumer purchases or enjoy a more extravagant lifestyle unless you’re a damned fool.

In fact, if you are buying a home now, you are in the very fortunate position of being able to get a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at historically low interest rates. I had to pay 12% on a 30-year-fixed on a house I bought in 1980 because that’s what interest rates were then; there was a ton of inflation in the economy (which somehow did not work its way into the COLAs my state employer gave its employees, in fact, COLAs for state workers were virtually non-existent during that awful time).

(In fact, in 1981, when John Spellman was governor — our state’s last Republican governor, and in a moment you’ll know why he was — state workers couldn’t even be certain of getting paid at all. That’s because the state was in one of the worst budget crunches in state history, and Spellman decided to change the schedule for issuing paychecks, which had the effect of all state workers — with absolutely no advance warning — being told their pay would be held back an extra month so the state could earn a little extra interest.

This was an incredibly stupid thing to do, and raised so little money toward balancing the budget — only about $4 million — that strong suspicions linger to this day that Spellman did it simply out of Republican mean-spiritedness toward public employees. Tens of thousands of state workers were unable to make their mortgage payments, and some couldn’t even buy food; Spellman issued a public statement asking banks and mortgage companies to forbear late fees and foreclosure threats against state workers. This was laughable, and worthless at your bank’s payment window. But here’s the real kick in the groin: Spellman ordered DSHS to deny food stamps to any state workers who applied. This was flatly illegal, and later was reversed by the courts, but it took years to litigate and starving state employees didn’t get the food stamps when they needed them. Let me tell you there was HATRED — not partisan disagreement, or even personal dislike — but actual HATRED of Spellman and his Republican Party because of this.

(There were, at the time, around 100,000 state employees. About the same as today, which tells you how “bloated” state government has become over the last 25 years. This affected not only them, but also their families, so Spellman — our state’s last Republican governor — shin-kicked several hundred thousand of our state’s citizens. There was no damn reason for it; it wasn’t about the $4 million, it was simply gratuitous shin-kicking of the cussed-meanness variety.

(Spellman was crushed in the next election by Dixie Lee Ray, the weakest and worst Democratic candidate of our state’s history, who never had a chance to get re-elected because 4 years later she was decisively bounced by her own party in the primary. That tells you how unpopular Spellman was. He still is; the old-timers who were around then still curse his name, and always will. That’s why he disappeared from public life, and keeps a low profile; he knows he’s a hated man. And this state hasn’t elected a Republican governor since.

Tangential Aside: Did everyone note the irony of Goldstein being blown out on his own blog? That he was uncharacteristically quiet, after the tired horse’s-ass trope, when I-Man and the excellent Piper knocked down each and every one of you?

My man Tim gives me hives. I called him tawdry. I was tuned in on the day he lied baldly and badly in public. I was not turned on.

I’m over my enthusiastic ‘yeses’ for his Initiatives, each and every one. I’m over my enthusiastic yes for his initiative. Now my support is grudging and reflexive, just as your grudges are boring and reflexive.

But I was not bored yesterday when he bore down on your nonsense and did not back down or back off. He won. You lost … you can’t successfully defend the indefensible. It was a turn on. Get over it.

So, when I see you young folks complaining about what housing costs, and how hard it is to make ends meet, I sympathize; but please remember that us old-timers had it just as hard as you, maybe harder — perhaps a great deal harder — and that’s the way the world is. It’s always been tough, and always will be.

When you get old, after you’ve spent a lifetime of hard work, and have made your mortgage payments for 30 years — come hell or John Spellman (there’s little difference) — and haven’t foolishly borrowed against your equity to buy cars or vacations you can’t afford on your income, you will have a house that’s paid off.

But by then you won’t be able to work anymore — either because your health won’t let you or employers won’t hire people your age or both — and you’ll be struggling to make ends meet on a fixed income that doesn’t go up with inflation. That is, if you HAVE an income, if the corporation you worked for hasn’t stolen it by going bankrupt under Bush’s new bankruptcy law. You’ll have heart palpitations every time you see the prices get bigger and the packages get smaller at the grocery store; every time you pull out your wallet at the pharmacy prescription window; every time young folks want to raise your taxes for public works of the sort you don’t use anymore.

You may not have a mortgage payment anymore, but if you live long enough, your property taxes will be more than your mortgage ever was; and you’ll toss in turn every night, sick with worry about whether your money will run out before your life does.

So, young people, know that I feel for you; us old-timers have all been there, seen that, and done it; we have our own worries, of the sort you yourselves will learn about someday, but we do understand what you’re going through and we do know how hard it is and you do have our sympathy.

May you live a long time and enjoy watching many sunsets (this form of recreation is free, and is the only recreation some of us were able to afford all of our lives) and keep your mortgage payment worries in perspective: Someday, your taxes will be more than your payment ever was. Trust me on this.

@14 “Don’t you just love it when Democrats get down and go down on their own?”

We’ve been preoccupied lately with fighting off the neoconvicts, but things will be back to normal soon, and Democrats will revert to their fratricidal tribal customs as sure as it rains in Seattle in winter.*

If Rudy’s it in February, then scary shrill Hillary is it for sure in November 2008. All you ‘Crats have to do to take it away is pull a back issue of the NYT Mag out of the gutter or the sewer. That would be the issue with Rudy on the cover. Mimeo and blast-FAX that picture, by the millions, to every legal and illegal and canine voter in America. He’s the creepiest man in the world, and will get only the creep-and-perv vote.

Very good article in the current NYT Mag about the immolation of the Religious Right. Good article in the new Newsweek about nuclear power, and about the irrationality of wind and solar. Correspondingly good article in National Review about the near-criminal insanity of ethanol and farm policy. (George Will noted, years before Welfare Reform, that most welfare in America goes to the middle class and above. Most farm subsidies go to millionaires.)

Circumstantial evidence points to strong psychotropics. They create a sense of complete disorientation where perceptions of the world, while fed by external stimuli, bear no resemblance to the world we’re actually in.

Call the cops if you want. Possession cases, especially for drugs in this class are seldom prosecuted. The expense is as high as for any other trial, prosecutorial resources can be spent on higher-profile cases, and you don’t get good shots of huge bags of cocaine or guns being hauled out of the house.

@21 (continued) Rudy isn’t my problem. He’s your problem. He isn’t going to be president. Whether he’s your candidate for president is for you to decide. I don’t care either way. The GOP couldn’t win in ’08 if they ran Mother Teresa. That’s what Chimpface has done to you and your party.

If you want to tar and feather him before he makes good his escape to his 98,000-acre ranch-in-waiting in Paraguay, which has no extradition treaty with the U.S., which is not a coincidence, feel free. I’ll even bring some tar and chicken feathers while you build a fire under the pot.

I’m sure you would get a huge turnout for a tar-and-feather party. 80% of the people in this country think Dubya sucks. At least 50% of the voters, and perhaps quite a few more, are going to retaliate against every Republican candidate on the ’08 ticket just to get even with you stupid bastards for supporting the worst politician since Idi Amin. Even Willie Sutton had more class than Bush; he only stole money, and only stole it from banks, and never killed anybody.

So, fire up the kettle, put a few beers on ice in the cooler, buy some hotdogs and chips for the tailgate party, and get ready for the public lynching of an entire political party because that’s what’s going to happen just one year from now.

Dish is a dish best eaten cold, a good thing for the tepid little bow-tie daddy with a dead-fish handshake. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (spawn of Laura), dishes it up in only 894 pages, which I haven’t read.

Did check out the New York Review review, though, (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20774) and was surprised that Counterculture McGovernik George McGovern voted in 1976 for Ford, not Carter (“a mean little man”), and that old Arthur had an Enemies List. Mad Madeleine Albright was on it; Henry Kissinger usually wasn’t.

ASJ, in case you’ve forgotten, wrote the books on powerful pushy activist presidents. Jackson and FDR? He liked them. But when Republican presidents became powerful, pushy activists, Schlesinger called them imperialists.

And who knew, until recently, that old Arthur was a secret swinger in the swingin’ JFK White House? When Kennedy talked about busting it off in old Arthur, he wasn’t talking about Schlesinger, but maybe should have.

@27 There is some truth to what you say, but if we somehow get another Republican in the prosecutor’s office, which can occur in King County only if they steal the election, opportunities for witch-hunting will exist. You know what I mean: 20-year sentences for possession of 1/10th gram of cannabis. That’s what legislating (their version of) morality is all about.

Meanwhile, the Pope is exhorting Catholic pharmacists to refuse to fill certain prescriptions, and threatening them with eternal damnation if they obey society’s laws and the rules of their profession.

Come mid-January, you’ll long for a little global warming…Or a round trip excursion for you and Mrs. R to Palm Springs, Cancun, or Bimini…

Here’s a recipe that will get you through those cold, ugly, nasty PNW winter months:

Rabbit Pie

3 young rabbits (or one old and grizzled Green Lake rabbit)
1 medium onion
5 rashers of un smoked bacon
2 cloves of garlic
fresh herbs (rough chop parsley, thyme, chives, to taste)
small glass of dry sherry
frozen short crust pastry (unless you can make your own better)!
seasoning
1/2 pint double cream
Clean and skin bunnies as usual,(you can reserve kidneys as garnish). Place in tray, whole and cover with bacon. Cook in moderate oven for about 15 mins.
Meanwhile sweat sliced onions and crushed garlic in a pan until soft. Add sherry and reduce. When rabbits cooked, tear off as much meat as possible and add to pan with the bacon, choopped.Throw in herbs, add a little water if neccesary and cream. Roll out defrosted pastry about 1/4 inch thick and eggwash. Place rabbit mix in suitable pie dish and top with pastry. Cook in moderate oven until pastry golden.
Pan fry kidneys in a little butter and serve as garnish.

Serves four generously.

Does the thought of reserving your kidneys as a garnish excite you as much as it excites me? Sure hope so!

My rabbi, Roger, Roger Rabbi, is vexed with me. And all I did was comment on Goldycrat autophagia.

When pondering the next Clinton presidency, d-lycergic acid is for sure my drug of choice. Gonna be a trip.

Keep in mind that I almost voted for fat Baptist Bill Clinton in 1992 (had written to my hero, Big Dick Cheney, that the only way I could support GHWB was if Cheney were on the ticket, preferably at the top), and that I — long before Greenspan — called Clinton a rather good Republican president. But also keep in mind that Hillary makes me heave. Must be drug reflux.

There you go again. Picking on the girl. Attacking Christine Gregoire.

But you give her too much credit for tearing down my party. I mean, 133 votes was a steamroll and a mandate, but it wasn’t a blowout, and at least one of those votes might have come from Jane’s dog, a rotter and a wanker.

The Rudy cover was from about 4 weeks ago. Creeped me out. And, yes, I noted on this blog many moons ago that Republicans are dead as dog shit. They may survive, wrote I, as a pallid nativist rump with the GOP brand, but the alleged conservatives who gave us Bush and who are Bush have killed Republican conservatism — compassionate, dispassionate, or mean-spirited — maybe forever.

We survived 1964. We survived 1974. We don’t survive suicide.

Rush and GWB could not have killed conservatism any better if they’d been stealth jihadists from the Islamo-fascist DNC. And maybe they were.

Yep, that’s what Norm Maleng was doing all those years, whizzing on your Hempfest. Taking away your neo-constituional rights to get shitfaced, chimpface. Ramming his tumescent morality down your throat. Maybe that’s why you croak, at length, in print, in public.

Hey, you want something to scare you? The Fed frantically cranked up the speed of the printing presses–er, I mean dropped their lending rate another quarter of a point again this afternoon. This will make stock prices rise, along with the price of everything else.

I wonder how long it’s going to be before the neocon-artists start trying to convince us that inflation doesn’t matter any more than deficits.

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